Stephen Dubner

Driving home, I had a realization about what we'd seen there.

Emily and I had sat for days with different people who all believed they'd glimpsed a vision of the future.

Abdi Aziz had a vision of Waymo finishing what Uber had started, taking the market for itself.

Carl had a vision of a future where he drove again, to the beach with his wife.

Counselor Mejia had an ominous vision, where her neighborhood was empty, the people all replaced by machines.

Everybody was here in the present fighting for, fighting against a movie playing in their minds.

Here's the vision I see.

I started to glimpse it in a conversation with reporter Timothy B. Lee.

We were talking about the future.

He was describing his vision of how things were about to change.

He pointed out how today, if a robot driver makes a mistake, footage goes viral online.

But someday soon, he imagines we'll be in a situation where the clips that go viral will be of human beings doing the kinds of things on the road that today we just tolerate.

Like, can you believe this maniac is still allowed to drive?

I do think that society's tolerance for bad driving is going to go down.

So there's been this trend over the last few decades where the amount of training you need as a teenager to get a driver's license has been going up.

I think that'll continue to go up.

And if somebody's caught drunk driving, we're pretty reluctant to take the driver's license away because their livelihood might depend on it.

But once driverless taxis are cheap or once you can buy a driverless vehicle...

A judge might be much more comfortable saying, like, the penalty for your first instance of drug driving is a lifetime ban on driving a car.

Like, you can have a driverless car that takes you wherever you want, but you just can't get behind the wheel.